300 Beta testers will get their hands on Valve’s prototype Steam Box, with other hardware partners making a variety of Steam Machines for customers. All expected in 2014

Valve has lifted the lid on the the second of three announcements, confirming many people’s suspicions by announcing SteamOS running hardware. These will be called Steam Machines, and while Valve has their own prototype in the works, many other hardware partners will also be created Steam Machines.

Be the first to beta test a Steam Box

Although retail products are expected to hit in 2014, 300 people will be added to a beta program to test the new boxes, and you can enter this on the Steam Machine announcement page. It requires you to have a Steam account, ten friends and have played a game in Big Picture mode with a controller.

In a Q&A section for the post, Valve confirmed that streaming of games from other systems will work with all the current games on Steam, allowing them to claim that the Linux-based box can run all the 3000 games on the Steam service. Beta testers will be allowed to hack the box as well, installing their own OSs and perform other modifications to it.

It’s a very exciting time for gaming and Linux. What will the third announcement bring?